In order to control parallel jobs executed using a plurality of nodes in a large-scale distributed system, or to manage nodes or components of nodes in the entire system as “resources”, it is sometimes necessary for the node that controls jobs or the entire system to gather information of the state of the management target in real time.
In the information-gathering communication for performing such gathering, there is an issue of the communication volume of the communication or the transmission rate, in transmission and reception on the network. In recent computer systems, the communication speed in the network that connects between nodes is significantly lower than the processing speed of the computer provided at each node, and therefore, the communication volume for information of the state of the management target transmitted on the network becomes the main factor in determining the level of the load of the entire information gathering mechanism.
In order to reduce the load mentioned above, the following network management system has been known. Terminal apparatuses output the state inside the apparatus as management information. Intelligent agents (intermediate management apparatuses) connected to them in the LAN (Local Area Network) obtain their MIB (Management Information Base), gathers them, and creates a gathered MIB. The management apparatus connected to them by the backbone LAN manages the terminal apparatuses by managing the gathered MIB. This known art realizes a network management system that does not put a load on the network apparatus in which the traffic between the network management apparatus and the respective terminal apparatuses is low, and that enables easy analysis of management information as well as management without the need for the administrator to be aware of the difference in vendor-specific management information. (For example, Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 9-298543).
However, in the information-gathering communication that does not have a layered structure, it is difficult to efficiently reduce the communication volume on the network that connects between nodes, in the process of transmitting a message from the transmitter side node to the receiver side node.